In Marianne’s silence, Vi moved on. “Well, that’s how I know we still have a chance at winning. Because all the ‘I couldn’t listen because my mind was on lip gloss’? I figured it was mostly for show.”

So she’d said it. What they both knew. What was left for Marianne to say?

Vi returned to their papers, to the cards. She lifted up a math folder and waved it back and forth. “It’s time. And it’s getting cold again.”

“I know! Why are there only pockets of wonderful each day?” Marianne shivered and looked to the skies. The once cloudless blue had turned smoke gray.

They headed back to Marianne’s house and hunkered down in her room.

It was always strange to have a new kid in your space. You wanted to explain stuff that might seem odd or point out things they might like.

“That’s my crafts supply collection,” she told Vi as Vi placed her things on top of Marianne’s plastic cabinet.

“Fun,” Vi said, though she looked like she found it anything but that.

“My mom is going to teach me macramé when this school year is over,” she said. “I also want to learn to knit a sweater. Check out my shirt rug!” Marianne lifted up her tangerine masterpiece.

“Very domestic,” Vi said. “It’s flash-card time.”

Marianne sat on the opposite end of her bed and prepared herself. She liked that for this she didn’t need notes and she didn’t need to answer a bunch of questions. She just listened and repeated and listened and repeated and eventually her brain absorbed it. Well, some of it. She had a couple of dozen facts down as second nature as her home address at that point, and a few she knew only as well as her cousins’ birthdays—hit or miss.

But as they rounded the twenty-minute study mark, the mystery of Vi distracted her.

“Hey. Will you be okay if we don’t win?” Marianne asked. The closer they were getting, and the harder they tried, the more Marianne worried what would happen when she inevitably let down the team on the big day.

“Will you?” Vi asked.

Marianne didn’t know.

Vi pulled up a flash card and said, “One more thing.”

And Marianne learned it.

And in the three more weeks that went by before Regionals, those “things” grew and grew. She picked up more “things” from homework, too. The math was hard. So hard. But she felt like she could manage some of it. At least in Mr. Garcia’s class, if not in Quiz Quest, where math questions hit her like a slingshot and Dan and Vi and Nina scribbled away, answering them before Marianne could figure out which step to start with and how to write it down. It just went too fast.

Sometimes, on their Google Meets, Dan grabbed his old puppets and performed the history for her, putting the character on his stronger arm and bouncing it around in long monologues. He had a lot of fun using a king puppet as George Washington. “It’s exactly what he didn’t want. Get it?” Dan joked.